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Apple Watch: A Nine-Day Road Test

Before I get started, there’s one thing you should know: Despite a decade at Style.com, I’m a Luddite, dependent on my 20-something colleagues at work for connecting my laptop to the printer and uploading interviews to my hard drive, and my husband at home for just about everything. He’s actually convinced that I emit some sort of wacky ions that screw with anything that has a battery. Screens freeze, files get lost, passwords suddenly stop working.

Road test the Apple Watch? Me?

The closest I’d gotten to one was a glass vitrine at the dinner party preview Azzedine Alaïa threw at his home during the Paris fashion shows last October. Once I elbowed my way past the likes of Salma Hayek Pinault and Mick Jagger and got a view, the watches looked cool—sleek, modern, and, most of all, identifiably Apple, with a miniaturized version of the iPhone’s familiar rounded-corner rectangular screen for a face.

At the time, though, I couldn’t quite picture myself queuing up for the inevitable wait at the Apple store on Fifth and 57th to buy one. For starters, I’m not a watch wearer, let alone a watch obsessive. I gave up wearing one sometime in the early ’00s, well before my first iPhone but after my first cell, like other people. There are Rolex and Cartier Tank and Hermès Cape Cod-wearing holdouts among my friends, but watches have become status symbols; without a fancy one to wear, most of us rely on our mobiles to check the time. What could the Watch do that would tempt me to go back? For another thing, I feel like I have too much technology in my life already. I have an hour with my son after work and before his bedtime. Lately I’ve instituted a no-phone policy until he’s safely tucked in, but the gravitational pulls of my e-mail inbox and (shame on me) Instagram feed are strong. I’d say the phone stays in my handbag 50 percent of the time. Would the Watch strengthen the umbilical-cord connection between me and the nearest Wi-Fi stream? Do I want to be that beholden to the “grid”?

Those questions aside, I was plenty curious. I’m well aware that the Apple Watch is the biggest launch since the game-changing iPhone back in ’07 and that the company is betting the bank on it. And, of course, I liked the cool factor of trying it out before everyone else—even if I couldn’t speak a word about the thing to anyone, let alone let it peek out from the cuff of my sleeve. When it did at last Tuesday’s Chanel Métiers d’Art show, I slid it back discreetly under my sweater and told the seatmate who spied it I couldn’t discuss it. That happened several times over the last nine days, and the eagle eyes who clocked it always wanted to know everything: How does it feel? What can it do? How much does it cost? Do you like it? Check the site next Wednesday, I said.

A week and a half ago, I took home the new Apple Watch in stainless steel with an adjustable magnetic closure Milanese band. It’s situated in the middle tier of the Apple Watch range ($549 to $1,099; mine is $649), between the affordably priced aluminum Sport version ($349 to $399) and the deluxe 18-karat custom rose or yellow-gold Edition (from $10,000). All the straps are removable and interchangeable. This is what I learned:

They’re Called Complications, But It’s Not Complicated

Horologically speaking, a complication is anything a watch does beyond tell time, and the Apple Watch, which mirrors your iPhone, does a lot. The biggest novelty for me was speaking into my wrist. The Watch will transmit texts as audio files or convert them into written words (with the typical manglings that process entails). And I got a huge kick out of having a phone conversation with my sister, me talking into the Watch and her on a landline on the other end. In my first week with it, I ordered an Uber, tried out the Maps function, and fell in love with the Activity Tracker. As with your iPhone, you can do everything from pay for your morning coffee to check in for a flight. There’s a learning curve, just like with any new device, but the Apple designers have maintained the one-touch philosophy that has turned the whole world onto the iPhone, technologically challenged types like me included. That, it seems, will be integral to its success. The screen is too small to support drawn-out interactions—stare at it too long and you’ll go bug-eyed.

There’s a Face for Everyone

One of the best reported aspects of the Watch so far is the fact that the face is customizable. To initiate the process, you force-touch the screen by holding it down a beat or two. (Hold your index and middle fingers to the screen a bit longer and the Watch will tell you your heartbeat, but I’ll get to that later.) I tended to toggle between the clean, bare-bones Utility face and the Solar face, which tracks the sun’s graceful progress across the sky, but the Motion and Astronomy faces appealed to the nerd in me, too. Within each face there are almost countless further adjustments to be made. The Utility face, for instance, has four displays, and I’ve got them set to show my activity, the moon phase (it’s a waning gibbous as I write, the Watch is telling me), the day and date, and my next calendar event. With a twist of the dial, I could just as easily have chosen to display sunrise and sunset times, stocks, my alarm, or the time in Cupertino. You could spend all day tweaking it. Still, most of these functions are available on the iPhone. What could the Watch do that the iPhone can’t?

This is where Apple’s breakthrough Taptic technology comes in. The Watch tapped my wrist when I received a text, when a call was coming in, or when it was time to stand up after an hour spent sitting at my desk. Each tap is subtly different. If it took a while to distinguish between the taps for right and left when the Maps function was giving me directions to our beach house in Tulum this weekend, it nonetheless made an instant relic of the rental car’s GPS. On my way to the airport, I added my editor and a few other key people at the office to my VIP mailbox, which means I got a tap if they sent an e-mail while I was away (I could read it right on my Watch or go check my phone), but I wasn’t notified about the hundreds of other e-mail messages that came in daily. They weren’t crucial, so there was no need to interrupt my beach time reading (or automatically deleting) them.

The Watch Is Going to Be Huge With the Kids

That is if mine is any indication. The first time my almost 7-year-old son spied the watch, he exclaimed, “Mom, you got a new phone!” instantly making the connection between the new device on my wrist and the iPhone I’m typically clutching in my hand. By day three, after we’d sent a few audio texts to his grandma in Florida and he was clued into the 22nd-century possibilities of the thing, he was lobbying for one of his own. The Mickey Mouse face suggests to me that Apple gets the potential the Watch has with generation Z.

Dads, Too

It was all my husband could do not to take it off my wrist. Of particular interest to him was the way you can remotely power up the camera function on your iPhone. That and music. With the ability to listen to synced playlists, even if his iPhone was at home and he was at the office, if he did get his hands on it, he may never take his headphones off.

The more your family, friends, and acquaintances adopt the Apple Watch, the better the experience will be. One of its neatest features is the Digital Touch, which allows you to communicate wrist to wrist with other people in your circle. You can send emojis, scribble drawings, or one-word notes, even send them your heartbeat. At the moment I have exactly two people on my Digital Touch list, both of whom work for Apple. I would’ve spent a lot more time playing with this feature if my pals were on it.

Fitness Freaks Are Going to Be All Over It

In addition to the addictive Activity Tracker, which monitors your calorie expenditure, exercise, and the number of times you stand up when reminded to do so, the Watch also has a Workout function that can keep virtual notes about your walk, run, or ride. Again, like with the old rental car GPS, the Apple Watch would seem to sound the death knell for specialized devices like the Fitbit and Nike’s FuelBand. It’s no surprise that Nike is on the list of companies that already developed an app for the Watch.

The fashion world has witnessed a few launches in this category lately. Opening Ceremony partnered with Intel, and Rebecca Minkoff launched wearable tech jewelry on her Spring 2015 runway. Being first to market means something to somebody, I suppose, but had they seen the Apple Watch they might not have bothered in the first place.

It’s Not Indispensable, But It’s No Mere Trifle, Either

In the nine days I’ve worn it, the Apple Watch didn’t replace my iPhone, but I don’t think that’s the intention. Our wrists simply can’t support a device big enough for everything we do on screens these days. I came to think of it as a filter instead, bringing what’s essential or pleasurable to me closer to me and editing out the rest. And what do you know? It also tells time!